It was a rapid-fire series of thought-provoking ideas. Following are summaries of each of the presentations.

Dane Jensen, GfK
Jensen discussed GfK’s approach to helping clients with predicting disruptive innovation. He gave examples of Chobani Greek yogurt entering the US market, Coppertone developing sunscreen spray, and Apple’s introduction of the iPhone. Market research traditionally delivers insight, but we need to add foresight. GfK’s approach encourages companies to look outside their own category to outside influences. Factors they examine include new technologies, health trends and industry experts.

Ellen Guggenheim, Blue Ocean Market Intelligence
Guggenheim stressed her firm’s utilization of what she called a 360 approach leveraging multiple data sources. She gave a case study of a new cloud-based business application that worked with Blue Ocean to do a market sizing exercise and to forecast their potential sales. The analysis was comprised of syndicated research, competitive analysis, primary research, secondary research and social media analysis.

Linda McIsaac and Gerald Klodt, Xyte
McIsaac and Klodt spoke of their firm’s development of “cognographics” – a superset of demographics and psychographics. Cognographics are based on the way the brain processes information, and they attempt to explain at a subconscious level why people do things. There are sixteen “cognofiles” – segments based on cognographics, which explain much of behavior and motivation across a wide range of domains. McIsaac mentioned that well-known researcher David Polltrack of CBS has used their methodology.

Paul Conner, Emotive Analytics
Conner spoke about his firm’s methods for revealing consumer feelings. Specifically he gave examples of how they use methods targeted at the subconscious to improve patient compliance through implicit understanding. He noted the same methods can apply in different industries. Connor used an innovative method in his presentation – he had virtual “Tonto, “ “Tarzan” and “Frankenstein” of Saturday Night Live fame make 10 points about his firm’s research methods.

Michael Hagerty, Mizzouri
Haggerty made the point that complex research will always have its place, but it’s a much smaller place than it’s made out to be. His firm’s approach is to delight the customer – and do no more (such as pushing solutions on a client). They emphasize speed and simplicity. Mizzouri’s primary product is a concept evaluation tool where clients control the three drivers of price: sample, stimulus and questions. They recruit participants from a national panel, then they present the concept and get the respondent’s first impression – positive, neutral or negative. They they ask “why?” in an open-ended format. The second step is to present a subset of the concept components in a randomized order, and they elicit commentary from the respondent on specific elements of the concept. Finally they score images based on first impression and present that score alongside the detailed qualitative markup of each one.

Robert Moore, RJ Metrics
Moore explained how his firm helps companies use their own data to make better decisions. They can create an RJMetrics dashboard from pretty much any data that a company produces. This allows firms to monitor key performance indicators and dig down in real-time. Their three steps are: extract, warehouse and visualize. Their historical sweet-spot has been highly transactional companies such as online retailers, but their solution applies to any industry where event-based data occur.

Kerry Gilger, VisualCue Technologies
Gilger explained his firm’s solution, the “VisualCue Tile,” which helps firms solve their big data an analytic challenges. Simplicity and transparency are core values. Each dashboard tile represents an asset and contains icons which represent aspects of that asset. Real-time changes in data change the properties of the icons. Users can sort, filter and group tiles based on those properties. The tiles can also represent chronological and geospatial aspects of business events. He gave an example of tiles representing the performance in real-time of individual US Postal Service delivery trucks.

Shelley Kuipers, Chaordix
Kuipers explained her firm’s innovation in crowd-sourced market intelligence. She said her firm’s approach democratizes market intelligence. She explained three products which are in use today, including a global women’s’ foresight and innovation network helping firms understand women’s purchasing, a crowd-sourcing prosumer indicator helping identify best customer advocates., and a predictive brand positioning matrix to help brands understand how they are perceived.

Adam Hansen, Ideas to Go
Hansen explained that business managers fear that innovation takes too long and is too risky. His firm helps increase the speed of innovation while reducing risk. They have a process called Innovation Engineering that helps firms move rapidly through the cycle of innovation. They train their clients to dissolve risks with small steps and make a new go or no-go decision on an innovation every week. They also have an innovation database. They offer three levels of innovation training basic, system and cultural change.

Fiona Blades, Mesh Planning
Blades explained that experiences build brands, like a bird builds a nest. Emotional responses need to be captured in real-time. Mesh Planning invites consumers to be your eyes and ears on your category. Participants send a text us whenever they see, hear or experience anything with a list of brands in your category. The text includes the name of the brand, the occasion, the feeling, and the experience. Then consumers have the opportunity to tell more in an online diary.

Anand Ramanathan, Embee Mobile
Ramanthan explained that his firm offers free mobile gift cards and mobile service credits to a global population of mobile users for engaging in behaviors and sharing information. They work through an app called EmbeePay on Facebook. Their service works across multiple devices because it is based in HTML5. When doing research in India, for example, iPhones and other smartphones are a bad option. They have built in rewards for respondents to realize for engaging in behaviors. Ramanathan gave a case study where Nielsen used Embee Mobile to conduct store audits in India.

Matthew Listro, CrowdTap
Listro explained that CrowdTap helps researchers reach difficult to access populations which live on social media but do not normally participate in research. They have 15 gamified approaches to get feedback from hard to reach populations on the on the devices they use. He gave an example of how Woolite generated and decided among thousands of new product names generated within one day. CrowdTap also does in-home ethnographics, shop-alongs and in-home usage tests.

Alex Slater, RealEyes
Slater explained that RealEyes helps find and measure disruption potential. They have created a way to rapidly apply Paul Ekman’s famed Facial Action Coding System (FACS). This allows them to track in real-time subconscious reaction to stimuli and indeed whole categories. They have an automated service where users can upload a product concept and quickly get a report on the emotional reaction. RealEyes can help predict likelihood to purchase and likelihood to become a fan of the product.

Preriit Souda, TNS
Souda presented via video from London as he was not able to attend in-person. He talked about TNS’ ability to extracting insights from social media across platforms. A key benefit is to target surveys to only those who have actually talked about your brand or visited your shop – without asking them. Don’t ask if they are already telling it. Rather, focus on the why part of the equation.

Stephen Phillips, ZappiStore
Phillips explained that ZappiStore’s goal is to take human being out of research analysis. They have taken the best of market research thinking and created individual research apps to automate the process. What clients lose in flexibility, they gain price and time. They tell clients they can get them 80% of the way there for 5% of the time and 5% of the cost. Clients configure and buy automatically. They just upload a visual of the product, create a summary, set a price range, and add in product attributes. The result is a series of reports showing who loved the concept, heat map, open-ended word clouds, a price demand curve, revenue potential and more. Results are also shown against an underlying normative database,

Herwig Lejsek, Videntifier
Lejsek freely admitted that he was not even familiar with the market research industry until recently. His firm primarily sells to law enforcement. Their software searches video and images to find matches. For example, brands can find where their logos – and their competitors’ – appear in video and images across multiple platforms. Where is a brand on the internet, and how is being used and modified. Lejsek stated that manual watching of video content is over.

Eric Warddrip, Placed Inc.
Warddrip explained how his firm uses smartphones as an ideal source to get a representative sample. They have 70,000 panelists across their own app and partner apps. They have validated GPS against questions asked. Demographics have been validated against social media and US Census tracts. The result is a highly precise sample which can be accessed via mobile. Warddrip gave an example of a high end clothing retailer that learned that young millennial women were browsing in their stores and then ultimately purchasing cheaper alternatives. Placed Inc. can help brands know where their customers are likely to visit, for the purposes of advertising placement.

Greg Laughlin, StatWing
Laughlin explained that the goal of StatWing is to modernize data analysis. He described StatWing as more powerful than Excel and more usable than SPSS. He explained how his tool actually has baked in the choice of data analysis technique based on the data properties. It automatically performs an analysis that is appropriate for the type of data entered. Reports and statistics produced are annotated to help the user who may need to brush up on various statistics. The tool allows an analyst to drill down and test different scenarios.

Menaka Gopinath, Ipsos SMX
Gopinath spoke about the extent to which digital convergence has changed our lives. Whether we want them to or not, people are using digital tools to live their lives. Today data is present everywhere. The goal of Ipsos Social Media Exchange is connecting the dots. They are adding a social layer to existing Ipsos research tools. They specialize in social listening and communities. They overlay social data and verbatims. They have a rubric where they visually summarize the positivity, virality, and share of social media mentions. She concluded that listening is as important as asking, and social is embedded in every story.